Saturday, January 5, 2013

Stemming Gun Violence for the Safety of Our Children

by Bill Cirone, Superintendent, Santa Barbara County, CA

Wounds remain raw after the horrific tragedy that
struck Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. As President Barack Obama
said at the memorial service that we have been through this too many times as a
nation. We have to change. We have to protect our children.

Columnist Nicholas Kristof asked a very telling
question in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy: Why can’t we regulate guns
as seriously as we do cars?

“The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres
like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have
them — but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns,” he wrote.

The National Rifle Association asked for an armed
guard at every school in the nation, but there was an armed guard on duty at
Columbine High School during that tragedy, and the armed guards that abounded at
Fort Hood were unable to avert the mass murder that occurred there a few short
years ago as well.

For the sake of our children, people from all parts
of our society are now asking for reasonable restrictions on assault weapons
and better controls on who has access to ownership.

Former Republican Rep. Joe Scarborough, an ardent
gun supporter, wrote: “The ideologies of my past career are no longer relevant
to the future that I want for my children. Friday changed everything. ... We
all must demand that Washington’s old way of doing business is no longer
acceptable. Entertainment moguls don’t have an absolute right to glorify murder
while spreading mayhem in young minds across America. And our Bill of Rights
does not guarantee gun manufacturers the absolute right to sell military-style,
high-caliber, semi-automatic

combat assault rifles with high-capacity
magazines to whoever ... they want. It is time for
Congress to put children before deadly dogmas.”

Kristof urged that we treat firearms as the
center of a public health crisis that claims one life
every 20 minutes. He pointed out that in school buildings
nationwide, building codes govern stairways and
windows. School buses have to pass safety
standards, and those who drive them need to pass
tests. We regulate school cafeteria food for safety.“The only thing we seem lax about are the
things most likely to kill,” he said.
There are five pages of regulations regarding
ladders, which kill about 300 people each year in
this country. Guns kill 30,000 Americans each
year.
“What do we make of the contrast between
heroic teachers who stand up to a gunman and ...
politicians who won’t stand up to the NRA?” he
asked.
Kristof wrote that as a lifelong gun owner, he
knows that guns are fun. But so are cars, and we
accept that we have to wear seat belts, use
headlights at night and fill out registration forms.
Our driving backgrounds are checked when we
seek a license, and we mandate air bags, child
seats and crash safety standards. We have limited
licenses for young drivers and curbed the use of
cell phones while driving. In doing so, we have
reduced traffic fatality rates by nearly 90 percent
since the 1950s.
Some argue that restrictions won’t make a
difference because crazy people or criminals will
always be able to get a gun. And they will. We
won’t ever be able to eliminate gun deaths alltogether, just like laws governing cars will never
eliminate car accidents. But reducing gun deaths
even by one-third would mean 10,000 lives saved
each year.

Here’s another sobering statistic Kristof cites:
“More Americans die in gun homicides and
suicides in six months than have died in the last 25
years in every terrorist attack and the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq combined.” Read that one
again.
Kristof said that many of us are alive today
because of sensible auto safety laws.
“If we don’t treat guns in the same serious
way, some of you and some of your children will
die because of our failure,” he wrote.
Now is the time to take a stand for the safety
of our children and our families. We need to
initiate discussions that lead to serious policy
changes. As another famous quote dictates: “If not
us, who? If not now, when?”
As a new year begins, it is a good time to turn
a new page on this wrenching problem.
— Bill Cirone is Santa Barbara County’s
superintendent of schools.
http://www.noozhawk.com/noozhawk/article/0
10313_bill_cirone_stemming_gun_violence/